Travel to France

A-plume-of-ash-rises-from-002Last couple of days I was at LAX trying to go to Paris. Our flight was canceled three times, so we gave up our trip.
Currently we don’t have a lot of French phrases for an airport situation, but we hope some new phrases will help people.

More phrases for an airport situation are available.

“What time is the first flight tomorrow” in Portuguese

“Is that the last flight out?” in Italian

この数日、パリに行くためにロサンゼルスの空港に行っていました。3度私達のフライトがキャンセルされたので、今回の旅行をあきらめせざるおえませんでした。現在、マイティーバースには、フランス語の空港のプレーズは、あまりありませんが、いくつかのフレーズがフランスの空港での人の手助けになることを祈っています。

“What time is the first flight tomorrow” ポルトガル語

“Is that the last flight out?” イタリア語

reflecting on MLK’s dream through language interpretation

Interpreting the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. into new languages allows us to reflect more deeply on their meaning. The “I have a dream” speech is so well known, and quickly evokes images of civil rights movement. White America has been criticized for elevating Rev. Martin Luther King to an iconic status while selecting speeches that feel safe, allowing us to focus on the dream as if we had achieved it, when in fact, we are tragically far from creating the society that he envisioned. Unfamiliar words challenge us to think about the meaning behind King’s words, through the lens of other languages and culture.

This year, Paul and Glen stitched together our crowdsourced interpretations so you can hear a portion of this famous speech in Spanish and French.

You can also explore individual phrase videos and see translations, as well as the country of origin. We elicited the help of people across the world to capture different dialects.

Marie Walburg Plouviez interpreted this historic speech in French:

Explore the french video phrase list and also hear the story behind her interpretation.

We hope that this exploration allows Dr. King’s historic “I Have a Dream” speech to take on new dimensions for you. The effort of having people from around the world engage in interpreting a speech that holds such deep and profound truths has expanded the impact of its meaning for us. We invite you to explore and extend your connection to his words.

Designing for Fun

Earlier this year, I gave a talk at Altconf “Designing for Fun” that is now on video” We’ve been iterating on an iOS application that lets people from our community record phrases, and we aspire to make it a fun experience.

Mightyverse is a passion project for all of us who work on it. I do mostly solo coding on the website these days with occasional pair programming with friends from the Ruby community. Most of the code for the iOS app is by John Fox, and we asynchronously collaborate where I edit code and sometimes add features as I sharpen my iOS coding skills. Developing something that is fun and really works for a community takes more design than code, so most weekends Paul and I iterate on mock-ups, talk through use cases and whenever possible connect with language learners who are willing to experiment with our latest theories on social language learning.

In the talk I discuss some foundational research about fun and learning, and approaches to game design. One idea from game design that is very relevant to Mighytverse is the concept of the “epic win.” The epic win is an extraordinary outcome that you didn’t believe was even possible until you achieved it (via Jane McGonigal).

Mightyverse seeks an epic win on two levels. There is the epic win for an individual who becomes fluent in a new language. Being able to speak another language is like having a super power — you can reach people, experience other cultures and make things happen that you could not otherwise do.

Also, Mightyverse, as a company, seeks to save the world’s endangered languages. There are over 6000 languages in the world. The majority of them are spoken by a tiny fraction of the population, and almost 80% of us, speak only 83 languages. Almost 50% of the world’s languages are endangered and one goes extinct every 2-3 weeks. Our epic win would be to create a system that would be sustained (and paid for) by people learning the “big” languages, which would always be free for endangered languages, providing tools that help people connect with their heritage, teaching and learning through social connections. We believe that diversity of language enriches our world.

You can watch the video or read my notes.

If you want to join the community that is experimenting us, using our iOS and web app to learn and share language, drop us a line. Our current focus is on English, Spanish, Hupa and Japanese with some active exploration into Mandarin. We would love to hear from you whatever language you speak or are learning.

I have a dream in Spanish: Tengo un Sueño

MLK_voices_strip

Two years ago, we recorded part of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech in English with multiple voices. With the help of various friends, we created Spanish subtitles for the speech. On Jan 20, 2013, President Obama’s second inauguration day, I wrote about sharing this part of American culture with English language learners. I was optimistic about race relations in America, yet felt that this speech helped us remember our past and share that painful reality with people learning about our country.

Last year, with french recordings of I have a dream, Marie Walburg Plouviez shared with us implications of interpreting and how to convey the meaning behind the words.

With this year’s recording of I have a Dream in Spanish, we captured voices from all over the world, crowdsourcing interpretations as well as recordings from old and new friends.

The interpretation of these words into another language causes me to hear the meaning in a fresh and powerful way. We didn’t use professional translators, but allowed the people recording the phrases to interpret them in their own words. Our friends M. E. Stevens, Tania Waisberg, and Enric Godes suggested some of the more poetic interpretations. Many thanks to everyone who participated (especially Enric and Bruno for organizing the artist voices at Vasava!).

This speech has become almost cliché in English, but when I hear it in new Spanish words, I hear the meaning reverberate in my mind with news from the past year. I hope that this project helps Americans who understand Spanish to reflect on our heritage, and that Spanish learners will be inspired to speak difficult truths.

Learn Spanish with ¡Dígame! card game

The Mightyverse card game for learning to speak Spanish:
¡Dígame! is now available on Amazon.

Six spots for the cards are laid out in a circle around a spot for the deck.

¡Dígame! gameboard has illustrations of gestures and phrases that help you play, as well as spots for the cards.

You may be asking yourself, “Why are the Mightyverse developers spending time on card games when they could be writing software?” or “Have they pivoted to become a board game company?” Good questions, that we’ve wrestled with ourselves. The answer lies in the fundamental goals of our company and our lean startup approach. The origin of the card game was a paper prototype for our mobile app.

To learn to speak a language, we must actually speak the language.  But how do you speak the language if you don’t already know it? Language learning research supports that people learn best in an immersive language learning environment, learning grammar and vocabulary by inferring patterns from the language we hear.  One of the biggest hurdles that we face as new language learners is to be brave enough to start speaking when we know very little and may feel uncertain about the true meaning of the words we speak. This is a huge barrier for most new language learners to overcome. ¡Dígame! came out of wrestling with that challenge for language learning gameplay. We realized that we could accomplish rapid iterations of the card game much faster than software and that would speed up our design process. Over the past year, we have held dozens of play test sessions with groups of friends, strangers, classrooms and families at all levels of learning, from near-fluent to people with no prior knowledge of the language.

Our overall goals for the games include:

  • validating the Mightyverse language learning model
  • understanding what’s needed to make language learning fun
  • developing a community of early adopters
  • driving awareness of the Mightyverse brand among teachers and language enthusiasts

We designed the game to reflect the language learning model that we believe is the most powerful and efficient way to learn a language. Each of the phrase cards in the game is linked to a Mightyverse phrase video with a QR code. We have analytics in place to see how and where those phrases are accessed.

With the first game complete after a considerable effort, it will be much simpler to create variations across different language pairings. We have InDesign templates with scripts to automate creation of the playing cards so that the production of the game can be scaled more easily across other languages.

We are quite far along on a Japanese learning game for English speakers and an English learning game for Japanese speakers that we have already started play testing. We’re also hard at work building our mobile app that allows native speakers to record phrases and share them with language learners. It is exciting to feel how our momentum has increased with everything we have learned over the past year, working with our growing community of speakers and learners.

We’ve had a lot of fun developing the game from it’s initial sketches to a full fledged product. It’s been extremely gratifying to see how much fun people have with it while learning languages.

Spanish Game Night @Ninefold

Last Thursday, we held a Game Night where we beta tested a complete version of our Spanish language learning game ¡Dígame!

It was held at the Ninefold San Francisco office, who hosts our web application and has a few Spanish learners who work there.

It was great fun. Here are a few photos from the group who played with the “starter” deck:

Andrew came up with a great way to show “This is an apple” by miming an archer shooting something on someone’s head! This William Tell reference was immediately understood by everyone.

Let us know if you would like to host a game night!

QR Code Success!

Reading QR Codes in ¡Dígame!We first developed the ¡Dígame! card game as a paper prototype for our new mobile app. Translating the game play from a mobile, social video-based game to real life worked surprisingly well.  When the idea arose to integrate video via QR codes on the game cards, I worried that the scanning delay and mix of phone and card game would interrupt the game play and cause the game to be less fun.  One of the biggest challenges in software design is that people say that want something, but they can’t realize all of the implications, so you can give someone what they ask for and have that end up as something that doesn’t improve the experience and can be distracting.  Due to this uncertainty, we launched our card game crowdfunding campaign without the QR codes and agreed to play test them before making the final decision on whether to include them.

Last week, Glen organized a group of people who had little or no Spanish language ability.  They played ¡Dígame! and had a lot of fun.  With a QR Code on each card, linked to a video of a native speaker saying the phrase expressively, sometimes with gestural hints, plus having the translation into English , the “fear factor” of being immersed in this new language was greatly reduced.  Each person was challenged to teach a phrase, acting it out like Charades. Even if that person had to learn from the English translation in the video, the rest of the group learned through the immersive quality of the game, decoding meaning by watching and using their own gestures while only hearing and saying the phrase in Spanish.

The feature of QR codes linked to expressive videos on the phrase cards has been a big success so far and adds a fun dimension to the game. This week we’ll be recording our latest revisions of the game phrases and creating links and QR codes for each phrase.  Today is the last day to pre-order the game on Indiegogo:
http://igg.me/at/digame/x/550786

Free for Bloggers

We have met our fundraising goal for the ¡Dígame! campaign, which means we’ll be able to print a run of 250 cards. If we can print 1000 the cost goes down significantly, but more importantly, our real goal is to reach people who actually want to play the game and learn or teach Spanish or Japanese (and more languages in the future).

If you like this idea and have a blog or podcast or some substantive way of getting the word out, we want you to be part of our outreach team! And, of course, EVERYONE who is part of the team, gets a free deck.

If you blog about it or talk about it on your podcast or something like that, just send us a link and your address, and we’ll send you a deck once we do the full printing.

“¡Dígame!” Gets an “ándale” From Indiegogo

We just announced success in meeting our initial goal for the ¡Dígame! Indiegogo campaign to begin selling card games that help people learn Spanish.

The game helps English-speakers learn Spanish in a fun way. The players help each other speak Spanish, using only Spanish phrases and non-language sounds or gestures, except during game setup and intermissions.

Supporters of the Indiegogo campaign can vote to prioritize or wholly fund the next language, choosing from any of the 30 Mightyverse languages or any other language if they want to help translate. Through this innovative funding and customer collaboration technique, Japanese has been selected for the next release of the game.

You can still fund the campaign to help us record of the Japanese phrases or develop new versions of the game for the next language you want to learn!

7 Ways to Signal Meaning when Learning to Speak

One of the most exciting parts of learning a language is when you can actually communicate with someone else in that language. When you first start learning it can feel like a chicken-and-egg problem – you need to speak in order to learn to speak. Some people spend years in language classes, before they feel like they have enough vocabulary and grasp of the language to hold a conversation. However, time and again, we hear stories of people who successful interact with people in their new language within weeks (or even days!) of starting to learn.

Benny the Irish Polyglot suggests “You are always ready to speak a language, no matter what level you are at” and has some great tips for getting started.

The secret is to just dive in, and we’ve encoded some simple tricks in our ¡Dígame¡ language game that make that easier. You don’t have to even use our game to get started.

We’ve identified 7 phrases that can help you get your meaning across when you have very little vocabulary. You can practice with a language partner before you try with a stranger. In the game, we use these to help players communicate. The neat thing about these phrases, is that each has a corresponding gesture that usually works if you forget the phrase. When you practice using these gestures and simple phrases, you get better at making yourself understood and understanding others when you have very few words.

7 cards: on left "repite, por favor" and "¿Qué significa?" then in the middle "sí" "casi" and "no" then on the right "Yo lo sé" and "No sé. ¿Qué es?"

Understanding What You Heard

  • Repite, por favor (please repeat) or Otra vez (again / another time) This is essential when you ear is new to the language and you want to hear something again. Rotating your hand in a circle will help your listener understand what you mean even if you don’t quite pronoun the phrases correctly, though English-speakers will have a fairly easy time remembering “repite”
  • ¿Qué significa? (what does that mean?) You can use the same gesture as “Yo no sé” putting both hands palm up to invite someone to use different words or gestures to explain what they just told you. If you repeat the phrase or word that you don’t understand, then the other person can help you distinguish between not hearing correctly or not understanding.

Clarifying Meaning

These are three essential clarification words and phrases. You can start with “sí” and “no,” but if you can use the longer versions, it will be a little less abrupt and will feel more like a conversation.

  • (yes) or Asi es (that’s it) — You can use the ok sign forming a circle with your thumb and forefinger with your other fingers spread upward. Thumbs up also works well.
  • casi (almost) — this is really important, often you need to get them to say more to explain when you know that it’s not quite no or yes
  • No or Asi no es (that’s not it) — with your hand palm down, move it back and forth. This gesture is more polite than the thumbs down gesture, and will be understood by most Spanish speakers.

Getting it

It is important to be able affirm when you understand or that you still need help.

  • Yo lo sé (I know it) or Entiendo (I understand) — clapping your hands together with delight can be a rewarding affirmation for your language partner who has helped you.
  • Yo no sé. ¿Qué es? (I don’t know. What is it?) — not strictly necessary if you know the other phrases, but some variety can really help move the conversation along.

Go to the list of Mightyverse helper phrases for ¡Dígame! here:
https://www.mightyverse.com/en/phrase_lists/dgame-signal-phrases